2015

Excellence in General Management

Winner

Andrew Robb - Farfetch

In the past 12 months, Farfetch has launched six local language sites in Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, German, Russian and Spanish. It’s also created the first global multi-channel click-and-collect service and released its first responsive site and mobile app. Andrew Robb’s team directly led these initiatives.

Andrew also oversaw a successful $86 million Series E funding round, which valued the company at $1 billion. Andrew directly runs all online marketing, operations and HR, and is on the executive board. In the last 12 months he’s helped the company to grow to more than 600 people across seven offices in six countries, and has also overseen the acquisition of the London-based retailer, Browns.

Runners up

Nicolas Brusson - BlaBlaCar

Under Nicolas Brusson’s stewardship BlaBlaCar raised $100 million in July last year. It was France’s largest venture capital funding round in the past decade and one of the top 10 largest tech-funding rounds in Europe in 2014. BlaBlaCar raised the money to fuel expansion, and on the back of this Nicolas oversaw launches in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and India and led several acquisitions. He is now turning his attention to Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Alongside international expansion, BlaBlaCar more than doubled the size of its community. Its headcount has also doubled to more than 300 employees, and the company has opened nine offices globally. More than two million people now travel with BlaBlaCar each month – more than twice the volume of traffic on the Eurostar.

Adrian Blair - Just Eat

Adrian Blair is directly responsible for Just Eat’s P&L across 15 countries, leading a team over over 1,000 people. Signing up new restaurants is a key driver of the company’s growth, and in 2014 Adrian’s sales teams signed up 9,300 new restaurants globally. In Q1 last year he led an initiative to fundamentally redesign the company’s sales model. Having transformed the productivity of the sales team in one city where the new model was trialled, he is now rolling out the lessons from the initiative globally.

Company culture is incredibly important to Just Eat and last year Adrian worked very closely with the HR team to define specific behaviours associated with the company’s values. He has personally trained every manager in the UK business in staff coaching and development, and introduced the concept of ʺundercover takeawayʺ to his management team, where periodically they go out and work in a Just Eat restaurant for an evening. This helps ensure that strategic and personnel decisions are grounded in an understanding of the reality for restaurant owners.